4.5★s
“We actually haven’t got a clue what we’re really doing – having kids is in many ways like trying to drive a bulldozer through a china shop. With broken legs. Wearing a back-to-front ski mask. While drunk.”

Things My Son Needs To Know About The World is a non-fiction book by award-winning Swedish author, Fredrik Backman. It is translated into English by Alice Menzies and illustrated by Anna Woodbine. It reads in the form of essays on various topics that the author has written to his (at the time) baby son, offering advice for the future on many aspects of life.

Between the chapters are comments and anecdotes, often self -deprecating, often hilarious, that detail this father’s mis-steps in child care. He apologises in advance for behaviour that is likely to embarrass and irritate.

Backman’s descriptions of incidents, like changing a nappy in a toilet with motion-sensitive lights and mishaps with elevators, are often laugh-out-loud funny. He advises on love and shopping in IKEA and the need to belong to something like football and the importance of friends.

He remarks on “easy assembly” baby furniture and the generational differences in raising children and the effect of information availability and the unwritten parenting rules that lead him into verbal and actional faux pas. “This parenthood thing didn’t come with instructions, that’s all I’m saying: You spit on the napkin. Then you wipe the child’s face with the napkin. You don’t spit straight on to the child. My bad.”

Backman provides a recipe for fried Snickers Ice Cream and for pre-eating hot dogs. The airport luggage conveyer belt provides an opportunity to explain God. And he tells his son that his mother is, on almost every topic, right, excepting for a very few crucial things. In characteristic Backman fashion, it is a funny, poignant and insightful read.